The author investigates the post-communist/post-socialist politics of memory in Slovenia. He approaches the topic through an analysis of architecture and rhetoric of new WWII and post-WWII memorial landscape and studies the ways in which collective memories are mobilised in radical reinterpretation of the past. In doing so, he focuses on the practice of re-valuation of collaboration with fascist and Nazi regimes into “anti-communist” patriotism. Analysing these practices, that span striving for reconciliation and radical reinterpretation of anti-fascist resistance and collaboration, he reveals the techniques of translating perpetrators into victims, and vice versa. What at first appeared to be an attempt to distribute guilt, i.e. unilateral translation of perpetrators into victims, has recently in Slovenian post-communist revisionist politics turned into outright denial of crimes committed by collaborationist units. On the other hand, and within the same narrative, we are witness to categorical condemnation of resistance movement.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38000685
The article explores the writings of Josipina Turnograjska, the first Slovenian woman writer who wrote in the years after the march revolution of 1848. Turnograjska used the events from the histories of Slavic nations as the subject matter for her stories. In her stories women are depicted as the figures who surpassed the male protagonists in courage when fighting for their homeland on the battlefield.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3564027
The chapter analyzes most frequent metaphors used in political and media discourses related to the process of the Western Balkan countries’ EU accession. These metaphors are a characteristic of public discourses on the European Union in general, but when used in discourse on the Western Balkan countries’ accession they become subject to significant modification. Together with various (western) European historical legacies (imperialism, colonialism) used as a tool for hierarchisation of European societies based on perceived degree of their “Europeanness,” these modifications enable ideological construction of the Western Balkans as part of the “Third World” zone and positioning it outside the symbolic borders of the contemporary Europe.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37436973
The article attempts to turn from describing heritage in the framework of official and everyday discourses of identity and politics of belonging towards acknowledging its spatial nature. The author focuses on the Guča na Krasu festival and explores two main questions: how a strong notion of locality is mediated by the non-locality of sound, and the ways in which globalization and mobility are remodelling music heritage protocols, particularly in the case of migrant communities. She explores the ways in which trumpet orchestra music, as one of the main genres of Balkan music on the world music market, is becoming an affective tool of identification and affiliation, and bringing a newly emergent global-local dynamics to the existing heritage management of the Serbian community living in this area. The discourses of heterogeneity and transnationality in branding Balkan music have led to an ambivalent identification with the festival among community members. Navigating between sound environments, music heritage protocols, globalization processes and affective technologies, the space is approached through an examination of the complexity of relations among communities, affective spatio-temporal sound collectivities, and music globalization processes.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36779309
Balkan music label has for a long time been a way of representing/promoting/selling the “exotic Balkans” in the “Western world” with the use of stereotypes such as Roma, war and violence, sexuality, patriarchy or socialist legacy. Simultaneously, it has served as the main channel through which the rhetoric of positive Balkanism has been internalized and used within the Balkan countries. Using the example of the »Balkan music awards«, represented as the Eurovision of the Balkans, article examines the regional music market as a process of reorganizing “post-national” music productions in a complex relationship with the neighbors.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37437229